The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [77]
And, really, how could it not? With 2,054 skiable acres offering a descent of 3,400 vertical feet of fun, Sun Valley’s Bald Mountain—beloved as “Baldy”—has thirteen high-speed lifts, sixty-five varied runs and a handful of on-mountain ski lodges made warm and sumptuous by oriental carpets on the floors, snazzy granite in the bathrooms and massive rock hearths kept blazing all day. In a sport known for its cold and discomfort and crowds and, yes, expense, Sun Valley’s efforts to eliminate all trace of…well, suffering, result in a rare ski experience of remarkable beauty and comfort.
We feel completely Thelma and Louise, my sister and I. The freedom of the road and the whizzing-by vistas empty of all but the occasional grazing cows, wind-whipped tumbleweeds and lonely-looking homesteads with names like Rancho Costa Plenty soothe our city-singed nerves. We talk nonstop and laugh, and Dad in the back nods off often. On the outskirts of Jackpot, Nevada’s last stop for gamblers enamored of burgs built exclusively of neon, I twist in my seat to see if he’s breathing and regard the deep-blue shiner under his left eye, the small scabby gash on his nose. Last month’s ski accident.
“Now, I don’t want you girls to push me,” he had said at lunch hours earlier when we stopped at a casino café in Winnemucca. Our perky server Angie, who was, she claimed, age ninety-one and bent nearly double from osteoporosis, scribbled his BLT order onto her pad with a gnarled-knuckled hand and zinged me a wicked wink. I swear that wink said, Go ahead. Push old Pops all you want—he can take it. We’re tougher than you think.
“Don’t worry, Dad,” said Camille as slot machines pinged and dinged in the background. “Everyone at their own speed.”
“I’m afraid I could be finished,” he said, suddenly glum. “My balance is shot and when the light gets flat I can’t see a goddamn thing. If I let myself get tired….” Well, it will be a Dad on the ski slope crashed, we knew. Not once in at least seventy years has the Ski Patrol had to haul Dad off the mountain in an emergency sled, and to have that humiliation visit him now, with us, simply was not the hope Camille and I had for the weekend. We would not insist he ski with us. As always.
So now as we zoom through Ketchum, the Idaho town that’s both home to Sun Valley and reknown for its famous former resident, Ernest Hemingway—he now buried in its cemetery—I worry, what if…. Dad? Finished?
All my life, never a ski season did pass that our dad of derring-do didn’t base his entire self-perception (it seemed) on the state of his skiing. From “the steep” he reached via helicopter in the Canadian Bugaboos to “the deep” of the powder in Utah, from the Sierra’s spring slush to the wide open bowls of Colorado, no snow or slope was beyond his ability or out of the bounds of his ardor. I cannot even imagine it, our all-terrain Dad slow-poking down the bunny hill or, worse, rotting in the day lodge where non-skiers and the injured sit around waiting—and waiting—for their friends or family to come in.
And yet: After a couple more miles we motor up to the door of the Sun Valley Lodge and two young doormen in uniform unload our skis and bags, bags that in the swank of the surroundings look especially old and sad and as down at the heels as we now feel. Compared with the hunky, handsome doormen Dad appears particularly wobbly and gray—almost Angie-like in posture—but he strides into the lobby like he’s Averell